Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed with posted prices under a range of assumptions about the designer’s information and agents’ valuations. Our results provide insights about the relative power of uniform and non-uniform prices, the relative difficulty of different valuation classes, and the implications of different informational assumptions. Among other results, we prove constant-factor guarantees for agents with subadditive valuations over identical items, even in an incomplete-information setting and with uniform prices. We also show that no constant-factor guarantee is possible for general valuations over identical items, even in a full-information setting and with non-uniform prices.
DOI: 10.1145/3373715
Authors: Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Tim Roughgarden, Warut Suksompong
Institutions: Tel Aviv University, Columbia University, University of Oxford
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: G1231314871, AF: Small: New Directions in Algorithmic Game Theory, Algorithms for Complex Collective Decisions on Structured Domains, G5127893394, AF: Small: Connections Between Algorithmic Game Theory, Complexity Theory, and Learning Theory, Algorithms, Games, Mechanisms, and the Price of Anarchy
OpenAlex ID: W2951669285